DON'T BE STUPID; BE A SMARTIE, COME AND JOIN THE NAPI PARTY:

German poet strikes out at the anti-warriors (John Vinocur, March 11, 2003, IHT International Herald Tribune)

The poet who sees things differently these days is Wolf Biermann, lyricist, baladeer, an incontravertible figure of respect in Germany. Hard to classify, this lank-haired man with washed-out blue eyes who writes poems, sings songs, and offers up an occasional, enormously readable political essay. "Great poet": So says, very judiciously, a man from the chancellery, having just heard, a couple of days later, what Biermann thinks of his boss.

Biermann, 66, is sitting at a little table, near the window of his house in Altona, a nice suburb, close to downtown, a good place for his small children.Schroeder is not his main preoccupation. It is his country, its "harte deutsche Vaterlands-Mus," or, roughly and inadequately, "the hard must of the German Fatherland." But with his name slipping into the conversation, Biermann contrasts the current chancellor's soft position on Saddam Hussein with a Churchill battling appeasement, or Tony Blair's treading against the flow.

"Schroeder's opportunism is the worst," Biermann says. "He's a victim of a democratic pratfall. All this guy wanted to do was get elected, and he turns out morally to be under Chamberlain and Daladier. Their appeasement policy was wrong, but at least they were serious. There was no historical experience to go on then." [...]

The son of a Communist murdered by the Nazis, he left West Germany at age 17 for East Berlin, where he became a writer whose renown and eventual role as a dissident grew together. In 1976, he was expelled from East Germany to instant elevation as a cultural hero in the West. His poetry remained a source of vast admiration, but his politics gradually changed. From someone, after coming West, who joined demonstrators blocking U.S. Army bases (and remembers, he says, "how good it feels to be part of the Oh So Very Good"), he returned to the dissident's role as a German who sees "vulgar hatred" and paranoia in the "the propaganda bogeyman" that has been projected here onto the White House.

In fact, with a German press, like Britain's, that has much more a pro and con division on Iraq than the single, missionary position of French newspapers, Biermann hardly speaks from persecuted isolation.

But what he says is tougher, more direct, and comes with the whip-stroke of his rage. He calls the meld of Germans now challenging the use of force against Saddam "National Pacifists" - no small damnation in a language where the word national, as in National Socialists, shakes with the sound of abjectness, a curse. [...]

But the bombs, the deaths to come? Biermann tells a story of he and his mother surviving the storms of fire that devastated Hamburg after British air raids in 1943. Down the street from the flames, his mother told him then that these "terrible, terrible bombers are going to free us from evil, evil people who took Papa away."

Can't you just see the National Pacifist rally and hear the Horst Weasel Song playing... Posted by Orrin Judd at March 11, 2003 6:27 PM